AMUSIA

Aphasia is the loss or impairment of
language abilities caused by brain damage.

Stroke or injury
which affect the language areas of the brain can produce a variety of
abnormal speech patterns.

One kind of aphasia results in
patients speaking nonsense. Another involves patients who may not
comprehend the speech around them.

Some patients may have
difficulty naming objects. Others may not be able to repeat sentences.

In another
kind of aphasia, patients may repeat what they hear without understanding
it. Other patients may not be able to speak spontaneously.

In
certain aphasics, the rules of grammar are affected, and speech becomes
slow or labored. These patients omit verbs, inflections, and important
function words. Others use the wrong ones.

Some stroke victims
suffer from anomia, where they
find it difficult or impossible to retrieve nouns. Different patients have trouble with different kinds
of nouns. Some cannot name fruits and vegetables, while others lack the
ability to name animals.

Patients who suffer from a syndrome
known as Pure Word Deafness cannot
recognize spoken words, but can
read and speak, and can recognize other sounds around them.

2.

Stroke victims
sometimes suffer from a rare condition known as amusia.

Amusia results from damage to the
temporal lobes of the brain, where primary auditory circuits are
located.

Amusia affects one's ability to recognize familiar music or songs.

In a familiar song, the words and certain nonmusical associations
are recognizable. Human voices, animal cries, traffic sounds and other
common auditory patterns are easily recognized. While musical information is forgotten.

Damage to specialized brain circuits known as feature detectors,
which are responsible for recognizing elements of musical texture such as
pitch, dynamics, and rhythm, may account for only the music being
affected.